Finally In Tune
by WildJackelope
Summary: 50 sentences written to fulfill word prompts. All from the BBM universe, both canon and AU. The title comes from one of the sentences.


_**A/N:**__ This was written for a word prompt challenge on a LJ community. The idea is to write one sentence for each word—except I tend toward verbosity and push the limits of grammar and punctuation, so I kind of had fun with that here :) And sometimes I let the rules slip, so there are a few that don't quite fit the one sentence rule. Anyway, this is written from various character POVs, and some aren't really specific because they could apply to multiple characters, so you can use your imagination :) Canon & AU, some strange ideas I'm toying around with, some based on a longer fanfic I'm writing. The title is from one of the 50._

_I should also mention... I read the BBM story right before seeing the movie (same day) so the two are intertwined in my brain, and I pick and choose some aspects of each in my stories. However, I did read AP's story first, so there are some things—probably most notably character descriptions—that are my own interpretation based on the limited details provided in the story rather than on the actors/script/etc of the movie._

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><p><strong>#01 - Comfort<strong>  
>He'd thought once that he wanted promises, certainty, a future mapped out like the highways he'd learned with twenty years of intimacy, but with those first shared glances after months apart—always watchful, even so deep in the trees the sun couldn't see them, blood pounding, heart trilling, always on edge—he understood that was the beauty of it: the unknowing, the unplanned, anything possible; the never predictable and always glimmering.<p>

**#02 - Kiss**  
>More like a breath, a latent whisper against his cheek just below the threshold of hearing, words that would never be voiced but with a tempered brush of lips on skin were understood nonetheless.<p>

**#03 - Soft**  
>One word summed up the entirety of it: her hand across his cheek like silk when he craved sandpaper, her body plush and fightless when he needed resistance.<p>

**#04 - Pain**  
>Sure, the missing was hard enough, the always waiting for skittish hoofbeats on mountain rock or the truck's engine roaring up the road. But that held nothing on the morning when he awoke and, for just one sleepy-eyed instant, the time it took his eyes to crane open to the too-bright sun, couldn't quite remember why it was that the world was supposed to ache so much. Well. He wouldn't let that happen again.<p>

**#05 - Potatoes**  
>Still better than beans, he supposed.<p>

**#06 - Rain**  
>When he frowned it was like rain; that's what Ennis remembered—those summer storms that crashed and howled and boomed then poured themselves out and left in their wake an endless sunny day.<p>

**#07 - Chocolate**  
>Who needed it when he knew lips that tasted far sweeter.<p>

**#08 - Happiness**  
>A bottle of whiskey and no cans of beans, campfire warming their cheeks, embers soaring until they're indistinguishable from the stars; in the distance, coyotes singing some wild lullaby; their own breaths and laughter high-pitched and feral, unrestrained—no sheep to babysit this time.<p>

**#09 - Telephone**  
>Two years passed before he picked up another one, and only then out of necessity; they only ever brought bad news.<p>

**#10 - Ears**  
>Jack held the little black lamb in his lap, scratching behind her ears once in a while as he worked burs out of her wool—darn sheep had gotten into the thorniest patch of weeds she could find, just for a taste of something better—and Ennis couldn't help chuckle at how much those two creatures had in common.<p>

**#11 - Name**  
>It defined them, that mountain did: everything to come compared to it, every loss and love, every meeting, every job and birth and death, every time their lives broke back on themselves and returned them, in trucks and on horseback, unused fishing poles in their packs, down dusty dirt roads stretching toward but never quite allowed to reach that one perfect peak.<p>

**#12 - Sensual**  
>mountains green, high<br>sky purple, wide  
>between: you and I<br>streams, sun  
>long breeze blows<br>bright stars above  
>dark earth beneath snow<br>moon high, fire low  
>you: lazy smile<br>good night, gotta go  
>I lie...<br>never mind, take it slow.

**#13 - Death**  
>John C. Twist sat across the rickety kitchen table from what he figured was his son's ghost but might've just as easily been the whiskey, took another gulp, lit a cigarette, and spat more than said: "Couldn't even get dyin right neither, could ya."<p>

**#14 - Sex**  
>Then there was that one night they couldn't even hear the coyotes' howling over their own.<p>

**#15 - Touch**  
>Ennis knew that Jack, for all his complaining, all his what-ifs and coulda-beens, had always been one to look on the bright side, and so he supposed now, if there were a bright side to the two urns half-filled with ash and buried in the cold earth half a country apart, it was that no one could touch Jack any more even if Ennis shouted "I love you" loud enough for all the world to hear.<p>

**#16 - Weakness**  
>By then Ennis had grown into a strong man, weathered to the world and guarded against it by all the impassable snow-fringed peaks of that summer, yet try as he might—or might not—he could never overcome his weakness for just a few things: the voices of his daughters when they called him 'Daddy'; whiskey, and with it, cigarettes, and the next morning, coffee; and Jack's eyes the color of the dark whiskey that made him forget and the next morning the color of the coffee that made him glad to remember.<p>

**#17 - Tears**  
>Leaving tears you open a little more every time, he knew well by now, and he'd long since given up hope of that gash ever scarring over.<p>

**#18 - Speed**  
>Jack figured he was about due for a ticket—not once in all those years had he ever been pulled over—but damned if it wouldn't have been worth it for the one more hour it meant they got to spend together.<p>

**#19 - Wind**  
>Every fishing trip wound the spring a little tighter, twisted it until it threatened to choke, until he knew, eventually, something had to give.<p>

**#20 - Freedom**  
>"Sure, I was mad once, a long time ago," she told him, her voice flat as the farmlands outside the window, gaze focused on the snow-swathed mountain beyond and the man who idled at the wheel of the pick-up in the driveway, "but then I reckoned I oughta be moving on, since you weren't never mine to begin with."<p>

**#21 - Life**  
>Jack figured out somewhere between Childress and Riverton that it was a lot like his old 1953 pickup: keep it working as long as he could, add some oil when things started grating, try to fix what broke, shine it up once in a while, make it pretty, and run it hard, run it to the ground because goddamn, when that truck gave out for good, that was it.<p>

**#22 - Jealousy**  
>As they stood staring at each other that first time—her graying hair bleached blonde facing his leathered, sun-freckled skin—she could neither hate him nor envy him, because for as much as they'd competed for the same thing for damn near twenty years, she realized they had more in common with each other than either one of them had with Jack: loving him, each in their own flawed way, yet neither one of them wholly able to give him what he yearned for.<p>

**#23 - Hands**  
>Ennis's truck was on its last miles, sure, but the bigger advantage to Jack driving was getting to watch him, especially that slight thrust of his hips as he worked the clutch and the intriguing grip his callused hand had on the gear stick.<p>

**#24 - Taste**  
>He couldn't make himself say "goodbye," as if voicing it would make the leaving somehow more real; better instead to dream of campfires and mountain peaks, watching the truck rouse dust clouds down the dirt road, biting his lip so hard he tasted blood.<p>

**#25 - Devotion**  
>Their very next trip after that calamitous Thanksgiving, they made a promise to really use the fishing poles they'd been lugging around as dead weight since 1967, though it took them every trip until the following November to actually catch anything; had they known fishing would be so hard, they might've gone on "hunting trips" all those years instead.<p>

**#26 - Forever**  
>He climbed up on the bull and tied the rope in a suicide wrap around his hand, pounded it into his fist, decided then and there he was holding on for the long haul, rules be damned, and if he got thrown before the time was up then that bull would have to drag him along, dead or alive, because this ride meant too damn much to him to let go.<p>

**#27 - Blood**  
>She wondered once in a while what the other woman looked like, if she was prettier, younger, what; but in the end she couldn't complain about her husband's "fishing trips" because he always came back with something feral inside him, insatiable, like he'd condensed all the wildness of the mountains and wind and thunder right into his blood and it couldn't help but boil over into her.<p>

**#28 - Sickness**  
>Over the years he'd developed a routine for that last morning of their fishing trips: wake before dawn, listen to the slow heartbeats and sleeping breaths his head rested upon, linger, build a fire, fuck hard and fast (and then repeat), cook breakfast, say restrained goodbyes, drive just past where they diverged on their separate paths, watch in the rearview until the truck receded into the horizon, pull over, stumble off the road, and drop to his knees and bawl as all that breakfast came choking up into the dirt.<p>

**#29 - Melody**  
>He never expected to be lonesome for coyotes howling, out of all the things he missed about that summer, but sitting on the edge of the porch one August night he found himself listening for their distant voices singing stories of wild places, melodies of pines and rivers and stars, and he thought <em>sing me your tall tales, coyotes, sing the mountain back to me<em>, and waited up half the night until they just about did.

**#30 - Star**  
>He had wondered once about empty spaces: the miles between the two of them, languid farmlands and straight-arrow highways chasing the horizon; the whip of the tent flap they'd left open to the Wyoming wind; the gap between their palms when their fingers interwove; that rack in the tackle box where lures should've been; that other half of the bed beside him; the darkness between stars. What became of desolate places?—what ever filled them? The fire cackled, its voice blithe with embers and ash, smoke escaping in clouds like the breaths they panted. He opened his eyes at its insistent whine, first one heedful eyelid and soon enough the other, kicked at a log with his boot heel until it shushed, sparks soaring from it, mingling with the stars. He had opened his eyes but lifted no more than his gaze, his head still resting in the crook of another's, their hands pressed until that gap must've dwindled away, the steady heartbeats against his ear filling the silence the fire had left. Smile opened, eyes closed. He knew now. The spaces between things, the darkness between stars...what filled them?—more stars.<p>

**#31 - Home**  
>Air exuberant with pine and earth and melting snow soared down from the green mountains, and the "For Sale" sign danced on rusty hinges until he reached out and steadied it, picturing a couple of dogs lolling on the porch of the little yellow house, a herd of sheep grazing the pasture beyond, and two pairs of muddy boots lined up on the doorstep.<p>

**#32 - Confusion**  
>Jack waited in the entranceway, boot tapping a racket into the wood floor, and Francine couldn't understand the awkward tension that had flooded the room as soon as he'd stepped over the threshold—just daddy's old fishing buddy, after all, so why on earth was everyone so on edge?<p>

**#33 - Fear**  
>"Jack, I... I..." Ennis began, but a log on the fire burned through, split into unequal halves that tumbled out of the pile, a convenient distraction; Jack nudged them back into place with the tip of his boot, lazily extended the near-empty whiskey bottle to Ennis who took it, lost his gaze into the flames, and said "Jack, I love whiskey."<p>

**#34 - Lightning/Thunder**  
>The truck's rumble down the dirt road leading to the little farm in Lightning Flat sounded to her like those August storms that would build and build all summer and finally thunder and pour and soak, later than she'd hoped for but appreciated nonetheless.<p>

**#35 - Bonds**  
>Ennis couldn't quite find the words to explain to her how eating beans and drinking whiskey around a fire bound people more than a wedding ring ever could.<p>

**#36 - Market**  
>He knocked the little brat clean across the floor—Christ, three years old and he couldn't even get his piss into a bowl bigger than he was—and after using the belt he figured he'd teach the brat a lesson, claim his territory, claim what should've been his, mark it as his own even though it wasn't.<p>

**#37 - Technology**  
>"Damn newfangled machine," he barked at Junior's Mr. Coffee as he pounded his finger against the power button, grunted curses through clenched teeth, slapped the shiny plastic exterior until his palm stung, none of which made the machine deliver coffee, then dropped to his knees, hands clawing the edge of the countertop, tears soaking into his sleeve, crying on the linoleum floor with his daughter watching him from the doorway, crying over a goddamn coffee maker.<p>

**#38 - Gift**  
>One daughter getting married, the other going to college, and he had nothing to give them, no presents, certainly no money—and no words, either, when they told him that just being their daddy was enough.<p>

**#39 - Smile**  
>Alma wondered just how many fish a man had to catch to make him come home with an ear-to-ear smile that didn't fade for a good three weeks.<p>

**#40 - Innocence**  
>Ennis's rare monologue was broken only by his own distraction: "Wonder what ever happened to that harmonica anyway," he said as nostalgically as Ennis Del Mar ever said anything, and Lureen, who had perhaps heard one too many tinny, off-key tunes about the Big Rock Candy Mountains, only raised her eyebrows vaguely and replied equally so, "Yeah, wonder what."<p>

**#41 - Completion, #42 - Clouds, #43 - Sky, & #44 - Heaven**  
>It had no pearly gates, only towering pines, but he recognized it nonetheless, and he might've laughed at how all of them had been wrong about the two of them in the end, except none of that mattered to him. Not anymore. Not here. The trail wasn't much wider than a deer path, just big enough for two people if they walked with their shoulders touching, and in a step he set off bounding along toward where it meandered up the mountain slopes, past the tree line, past the clouds' rest on the purple horizon and maybe past the sky itself, toward a patch of sunlight just before the bend where a dark-haired young man waited and smiled into a harmonica that was somehow, finally, in tune.<p>

**#45 - Hell**  
>His dad had laughed at his inquiry, told him dogs and horses didn't go to heaven, so Ennis figured if he was going to hell for the man sleeping beside him then it couldn't be too bad of a place, what with all his pets going there too, and his horses, and Jack.<p>

**#46 - Sun**  
>He'd always associated Jack with the nighttime, and with stars—starry-eyed, two little universes brimming to their edges with all those dreams—but outside, here now in the long sunsets of July, he decided the sun suited him better, dark irises flicked with gold like the rich soil beneath them on that mountain or the sparks popping up around their pot of coffee boiling on the fire.<p>

**#47 - Moon**  
>When he came home after that first week her eyes narrowed into slits like the tiniest sliver of a moon and her voice sounded just about as cold: "Your girls missed you."<p>

**#48 - Waves**  
>She recognized everything unspoken, unspeakable, hiding just beneath the guarded surface of his voice, "a real good friend" the only phrase she heard but one brimming with regret: love and need pared down to a few muttered words, sound waves crashing through a receiver.<p>

**#49 - Hair**  
>From her, she knew her son had inherited buckteeth, gentleness, and a propensity to roam, and from his father, broad shoulders, kind eyes, and dark unruly hair, the latter of which posed quite a problem given that John C. Twist's hair was pale and straight.<p>

**#50 - Supernova**  
>It began as a glimmer—the last ember in the morning fire, hinting, whispering—but twenty one years later he couldn't contain it anymore, felt it exploding outward, roaring, beaming, insistent, huger now than the confines of his chest or of their furtively clasped hands: a red supernova of a carefully swaddled heart.<p> 


End file.
